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MONT TREMBLANT, QUE.—The southern town of John McAfee’s youth was a quiet place in the 1950s.

It was an era that seemed, to the young British-born boy with an abusive father, plastic and artificial, one in which everyone was dying of boredom.

So the boy, who would decades later found the ubiquitous antivirus software, changed it, leading the neighbourhood boys out into the forest surrounding Salem, Va., where they built their own world: of freedom, without adults or chores or calls for dinner.

“And it was great,” says McAfee, a tall, lean 67-year-old now. “We got to escape from the real world and create our own.”

He’s been doing it ever since.

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Late last year, McAfee ignited a media frenzy as he fled authorities in Belize following the murder of his island neighbour in the small Central American country.

The fame and notoriety kindled during that four-week saga that began last November is now stoking McAfee’s next incarnation, that of a celebrity, cranking out his life story in the form of a documentary, biography, graphic memoir and an upcoming Hollywood film.

He’s drumming up attention, doing interviews and a series of video. The first online video, in which a red-robed McAfee lambasts the antivirus program still bearing his name while seated at a table laden with guns and containers marked “bath salts,” was viewed more than 3.5 million times in its first 10 days on his YouTube channel.

In rooms on the third floor of the boutique Hotel Quintessence overlooking Lake Tremblant, a crew spent several days filming for the $1-million documentary, titled after
his blog, Who is McAfee
.

“No matter what, it’s a fascinating story,” said François Garcia, CEO of
Impact Future Media
, which nabbed intellectual property rights to McAfee’s life story last December. “He’s a very interesting character and a story doesn’t get better than that — you’ve got love, sex, action, jail.”

McAfee has a firm handshake and a booming laugh, a head of tousled bleached blond hair. He leans back into a sofa and props ankle on knee, occasionally reaching into the front pocket of his hoodie for the pouches of candy tucked there.

He has been many things: NASA programmer, drug dealer, technology guru, so-called “eccentric millionaire” living a bizarre existence in Belize surrounded by dogs, armed guards and young women.

In his latest pursuits, McAfee casts himself as an average guy who’s encountered different circumstances than most.

“Therefore, my actions have been somewhat different than average,” he says.

Gregory Faull was shot in the head in his home on Nov. 12, 2012. Police wanted to question McAfee, a “person of interest,” in the unsolved murder. But McAfee went on the run, insisting authorities would frame or even kill him if they caught him.

Belizean Prime Minister Dean Barrow had a different take.

“I don’t want to be unkind to the gentleman, but I believe he is extremely paranoid, even bonkers,” said Barrow at the time.

Turning the saga, and that of his life, into entertainment is, of course, about money, McAfee says, though he won’t say whether he lost his fortune, as some have speculated.

It’s about recording his life while he can still remember it. And it’s something to do.

“If I don’t keep busy, I get into trouble,” says McAfee, foot-tapping, goatee-tugging, temple-rubbing. “Even if I do keep busy, I tend to get into trouble so . . .”

His voice trails off.

McAfee studied math in college and graduate school, until he was forced to leave for having an affair with one of his students, whom he’d later marry. By the late 1960s he was in New York, working at NASA’s Institute for Space Studies while nursing an increasing penchant for drugs.

A few years later, McAfee was building an automated computer system to run railroad cars despite regularly being so high at work that he was hallucinating.

“I had this enormous capacity to function,” says McAfee.

Until one night, when he inhaled a large amount of an unknown substance and the world as he knew it collapsed. For several days, he sat on a couch. He had hallucinations of living an entire life, only to end up back on that couch, in the dark.

“Basically, I had gone stark, raving mad,” he says. “Part of that, I never really lost. This was 40 years ago and my brain still isn’t quite right. . . . Something’s missing and I’m not sure what it is.”

He still wonders if he might one day find himself back on that couch, these last decades nothing more than a hallucination.

It took months to recover. Once he had “put the world back together” again, he worked in New York and London, Los Angeles and Cincinnati. He spent a year in Mexico, traversing the country in a 1972 Chevy van converted into a hippie-mobile, peddling jewelry and drugs.

Eventually he landed in Silicon Valley, working for leading edge tech companies. But, in an era and industry steeped in substances — what McAfee calls the “tragedy of Silicon Valley at the time” — drugs got the better of him again and he hit rock bottom.

It was 1983 when McAfee went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He says he’s been clean and sober since.

A few years later, McAfee started the company that still bears his name. By 1992, his shares in what began as a living room enterprise were reportedly worth $80 million. He left the company two years later. Intel Corp. bought it in 2010 for $7.68 billion.

McAfee dabbled in various pursuits — yoga, ultralight aircraft — before moving to Belize in 2008.

He bought a house on Ambergris Caye, 10 kilometres north of the town of San Pedro. The road was near-impassable much of the year so he founded a boat company, to carry passengers to and from town to the strip of beach where he and a slew of other well-heeled expats lived in large compounds.

In 2010, he bought 200 metres of property along New River on the mainland. He built seven houses, two docks, outbuildings and a gazebo, surrounded by a high fence. He hired and armed ex-convicts as guards for his flashy vehicles, his guns, his barely legal girlfriends.

He pulls out his iPhone and begins flipping through photographs, many gleaned from news websites, pointing out who’s who in the shots of a gun-toting, tattooed McAfee surrounded by tanned girls in bikinis.

“This was another well-known aspect of my life that people thrash me with,” says McAfee. “Women were quite happy to come and live with me and therefore, why not?”

None were underage, he says. Amy Emshwiller was barely 16 — the age of consent in Belize — when they met in 2010. She soon moved in with him, revelling in luxury she’d never known growing up in what she says, over the phone from Belize, was a poor family.

Emshwiller and McAfee both shrug off the time she tried to shoot him, putting a .357 Magnum to his head in the middle of the night. She missed. They’re still friends.

McAfee’s tropical paradise began to fall apart in April 2012, when dozens of police raided his compound in search of, among other things, a meth lab.

Police found nothing, but the raid marked the beginning of the end.

“Everything got crazy after that,” says Emshwiller.

McAfee accused the government of corruption — he says the raid was because he refused to pay a $2-million bribe to a powerful politician — and complained to international media. He says police continually targeted him after that.

“That began my problem with the Belizean government.”

Gregory Faull moved to Ambergris Caye from Florida after a successful career in construction. Described by his family as a hard-working, adventurous man, he was only 52 when he was found dead in his home, shot at close range.

Police wanted McAfee to answer some questions.

McAfee says he barely knew Faull and dismisses reports he had a particular feud with his neighbour over his 15 dogs, some of which were poisoned shortly before the murder.

“I had a falling out with everybody over my dogs; I had a falling out with me,” says McAfee.

But while McAfee says he knows nothing about the murder and points to Belize’s homicide rate, he wasn’t about to talk to police. He took off.

What followed was
a strange odyssey
that saw McAfee flitting about the small country in disguises — a limping street hawker and a drunk tourist, among others — to evade police, all the while blogging and doing interviews as means of drawing international attention that made it harder for police to remove him.

No one has been charged in the murder of Faull. Police say McAfee is the only remaining person they wish to question.

McAfee is living in Portland, Ore., now, with Janice Dyson, a 30-year-old former escort and dancer who met him years ago in Miami.

Dyson says they lead a quiet life, getting up early, walking their dog — just one now — after which he replies to emails and reads the day’s articles about himself. She’s also writing a book about her time with McAfee.

“I don’t want to make it seem like John is this great man who’s just, you know, Prince Charming. He’s definitely had a colourful past,” says Dyson. “But he’s definitely been a friend to me.”

He plans to stick around for a year or so, working on his new “career” in entertainment.

“The end product is something that hopefully might educate me or at least might validate my own opinion of myself,” says McAfee. “I don’t mean opinion of good guy/bad guy, but opinion of what’s actually happening in life.”

And what is actually happening in life?

“I’m just an ordinary human being, that from an early age stepped out of the normal path.”

Correction: July 5, 2013
- This article was edited from a previous version that misstated the name of the company making the documentary and the budget for the film.

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